Unlike blood donors, who give their donation under the direct supervision of the blood bank personnel, human breast milk donors tend to pump their milk for donation at home or other locations convenient to them and then often store the breast milk in their freezers until they have accumulated enough to bring to the donation center. Thus, in the absence of direct supervision of the donations, questions may arise as to the provenance of the donated breast milk.
In order to establish that the breast milk provided by a donor is, in fact, exclusively from that human female donor, some form of testing to establish donor identity should occur.
Many different methods of DNA typing are known for identifying or typing specimens from humans. Such methods include short tandem repeats (“STR”), microsatellite repeats or simple sequence repeats (“SSR”) analysis of human DNA; analysis of multiple human genes and analysis of human lymphocyte antigen (HLA) genes and loci by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) analysis, restriction length polymorphism analysis and other methods.
It is known that humans possess antigens which are specific to that individual. For example, the human leukocyte antigens (HLA) have been used in the past for typing tissue for transplantation.
Such typing methods, among others, can be used to test for donor identity in the methods featured herein.